An idea that I brought up on the phoronix forums: http://phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?90007-Exciting-Features-For-Fedora-20-quot-Heisenbug-quot&p=377337#post377337 Apper's settings have a section dedicated to notifying the user about distro upgrades, but its currently blanked out and unused. Now that fedup has been in a few releases and things have been mostly good, what if its time for those settings TO be used? I propose that after a stable release PackageKit prompts the user if it wants to upgrade their system to the newest Fedora version. The dealings of which could be handled by fedup, giving a popup when it was time for the user to reboot to complete the upgrade. Additionally, Apper could include a setting to check for prerelease versions, starting with either the Alpha or the Beta and offer to give notice of when to upgrade to those.
The Apper support for distribution upgrades is there (and I believe it worked back in the PreUpgrade days), but FedUp support is missing on the PackageKit end. Using FedUp directly wouldn't that great an idea for Apper, which is a cross-distribution tool. I also see on their mailing list that PackageKit wants to drop the distribution upgrade API entirely. I leave it to Richard Hughes to decide what to do with this RFE.
Interesting that PackageKit wants to drop the Distro-Upgrade API. I guess they're thinking that individual distros know best and something that complicated needs something more dedicated and precise? Alternatively this RFE could become a minimal daemon that pings the Fedora servers once a week or so checking for a newer stable version, which then prompts a Popup notifying the user of an available upgrade and a little "Click me to ugprade!" button. I'm just spitballing here, other ideas are of course welcome. I just think FedUp is a great utility and its just sad that its discover-ability isn't more obvious
Is PackageKit able to query fedup to get the list of any distro upgrades?
Richard, does the current PackageKit API still allow for wholesale distro-upgrades or no? Whether Fedup has a check is something I don't know but we could probably shoot an email over to one of the fedup guys/gals.
We are planning on making distro upgrades available via gnome-software eventually. Not pursuing the feature addition in gnome-packagekit at this point.